Emotions

If you're the kind of hard-nosed, stubborn-headed realist I am, things like visualization usually sound like some kind of hippie-ish New Age flimflam to you the first 10 or 12 times you hear about them. That's how it was for me anyway, and I'd always laugh a little and shake my head dismissively when I'd hear people talking about "the power of visualization."

But the more I studied successful people, the more I kept running into things like visualization, meditation, and taking time out of your day to focus on what you want. Cases in point:

• Henry Ford would take time out of his day to clear his thoughts and imagine the kind of company he wanted to build and the benefits it would provide to people

• Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla - both rivals and peerless inventors, and both professed visualizers who imagined their inventions succeeding

• Tiger Woods visualizes how the golf ball will move and where it will stop before he ever hits it

• Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he spent much time bodybuilding and again once he started, spent time visualizing what it would feel like to win Mr. Universe, and began acting like he'd won it already a few years before he actually did

• Jim Carrey, feeling broken down and beaten by his lack of success in Tinseltown, wrote himself a check for $10 million for "acting services rendered," dated it for 10 years later, Thanksgiving 1995, and stuffed it in his wallet so he'd never forget it. 10 years later, just before Thanksgiving 1995, he was told he'd be paid $10 million for the film Dumb and Dumber, and he buried the check, now falling apart and in pieces, with his father - it had been both of their dreams that he'd find success

Even Albert Einstein first hit upon the theory of relativity while visualizing it, and Steve Jobs talks about blocking out the outside noise to focus on the inner voice in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

I read about Olympic skiers and world class tennis players visualizing the slopes or the game. I read about martial artists visualizing a bout before it began. Business builders visualizing what their business would one day look like, years before it showed any signs of ever getting there back when everyone else thought they were crazy.

And I thought, this isn't just some hippie New Age junk. There's something to this, and I'm not doing it, which means I'm missing out on it.

One of the most annoying, horrible, and downright irritating situations you'll ever run into socially is someone suddenly inveighing against you with emotionally-charged, finger-pointing, judgmental arguments.

These attacks are usually unexpected when you run into them, and they'll frequently catch you off guard. They can be confusing to know how to respond to if you're more accustomed to calm, cool-headed debates about the merits and drawbacks of a specific subject - then suddenly here's someone sandblasting you with hatred and unadulterated emotion. I'm sure you've experienced it at some point or another:

“People like you are the lowest kinds of people there are! You think you can just take whatever you want and not have to suffer the consequences! You think of no one but yourself!”

Suddenly, you're so deeply on the defensive trying to prove these accusations levied against you are untrue, that you end up effectively putting your hands up and saying, "Whoa, hey, stop, that's not true at all!"

Morality attacks also usually have a powerful communal effect, with any bystanders to the argument usually feeling either a) swept up in the argument and equally enraged and emboldened, or b) so afraid of being castigated themselves that they either just agree out of fear, or they remain quiet and let things unfold, not wanting to get in the way of an onrushing freight train.

That means that when someone starts hitting you with moral superiority, you need to be quick on your feet to not get quickly cast out as whatever you're being labeled as - and the way to do that, of course, is fighting fire with fire: you must use moral superiority right back.

A friend of mine (Ricardus, actually) recently pointed me at a new piece of Internet marketing software called Scarcity Samurai. The design is simple enough; you install it on your site, use it with any sales pages or product launches you're doing, and it attaches a countdown timer to the page, and lets you set up a redirect the instant the timer winds down.

People who don't buy within the time limit miss the sale and the deal is closed.

Why would anyone run a deal that closes? Well, because, on average, these kinds of promotions do around double the sales that promotions without a close date do.

That's exciting news if you sell anything online, but - unless you're selling stuff online - you may be thinking, ah, what's that got to do with me?

Well, what scarcity does for sales, it also does for seduction.

Or, you thought women just throw themselves at rock stars the one time they get the chance to backstage because they figure they can come back and grab the guy whenever they feel like it?

I've been wanting and meaning to write an article on how to be non-judgmental on here for some time. However, I simply hadn't had quite the right angle to come at the piece with... hadn't, that was, until I did some digging into the depths of social psychology and came up with a gem.

Lots of people have asked for such an article; here was M, a little over a month ago, on the post on being a challenge to women:

“One other question: could you please write a post sometime on how to be non-judgmental and more constructive and encouraging? Many times I find myself thinking during a conversation, "Hmm, your career path/school/etc. sounds pretty dismal...why are you so unambitious? Not really sure what I can say that would be both encouraging and true." The conversation of course shuts down pretty fast after that. But I know that there IS something both encouraging and true I could say, and if I didn't have that thought in the way, I would probably be able to relate to the person and think to say it.

Best,
M”

Learning how to be non-judgmental is a powerful addition to the mental tools of any seducer - heck, any salesperson, business owner, employer, employee, teacher, student, parent, child, or friend. Being non-judgmental opens doors and unlocks verdant gardens of opportunity forever shut away and cordoned off from those less tolerant minds of the world.

Yet, it seems like such a painfully difficult thing to become... there are studies that show that even self-professed egalitarian individuals still have under-the-radar gut judgmental reactions (good or bad) to people of different races or creeds... which they then promptly rein back in.

So what is this whole non-judgmental thing really about? Can you ever truly be free of judgment... or is it all just self-delusion?

I have some interesting answers for you in this post; and a lot of it starts with a little thing called actor-observer bias.

In the article on operant conditioning the other day, I'd made some terminology mix-ups that a commenter with the handle Slightly Confused noticed and pointed out to me in a very polite and socially gracious way, and I checked on the errors he pointed out, realized he was right, owned the mistake, and corrected it. I commented back letting him know of the correction, and he had this to say after:

“Thanks for handling my earlier comment so well. I'll have to remember how you responded for when I run into that situation in the future. If you want another article idea, you could write one on corrections. It could talk about how to handling being corrected in different situations as well as when and how to correct others. The article could differentiate between corrections based on opinions and based on facts and could talk different situations such as pickup, a long term relationship, being out with friends, meeting someone new, and in a business situation, like one were a boss says something incorrect (or the boss corrects you), when you are with peers, or when you are talking to a customer. It also could cover the situations when you should and should not correct yourself when you realize you are wrong and the long term effects handling the situation a certain way may have. I realize that may be too big of a topic to cover but hopefully it gives you some ideas or something you can use.”

Some interesting ideas for a post there from SC - when and how to correct yourself, and when to perform a course correct, effectively.

And this is more nuanced than you might at first think.

There's a surprisingly great deal at risk in correcting oneself - you chance losing the confidence of those who were depending on you to know your stuff, you chance undermining and reversing whatever momentum you had, and you even chance transferring momentum over to an opponent who's hard at work endeavoring to snatch at the moral high ground away from you.

So should you ever do a course correct? With so much to lose, does it make sense to ever correct yourself... or might it be better just to soldier on, never admit mistakes, and keep your own personal reality distortion field tuned to maximum at all times to take others' eyes away from the inconsistencies?

A little while back, in "How to Find the Woman You Most Want: A 10-Step Process," Vaughn commented as follows:

“Hey chase I've been looking around but I couldn't really find an article on self esteem. I have low self esteem and inferiority complex. I always compare myself to others like ALL the time and I mean all the time. With friends,family, and guys I see at bars, clubs, and guys with their girls. When I'm out I feel so lame seeing guys with girls and I don't have one, it makes me feel like something's wrong with me. Especially on Facebook when I see people showing off all the good things going on in their life and I'm just living my regular one. Then I keep thinking about bad moments in my past that replay in my head over and over making me think I'm really a loser. I don't mean to vent so much about it but I know your good with people and to be honest I trust your advice more than anyone else. Could you help me out with my self esteem, confidence, and getting rid of the inferiority complex and reliving past failures? Thanks Chase, all of this stuff will help me finally get my dream girl.”

So, how to build self-esteem... it's the 10 million dollar question.

Everybody wants to know. And everybody else has got a solution.

This isn't one I normally tackle, because I'm a believer in action, and to hell with the words. Once you're taking action and improving your life, self-esteem, confidence, and all the rest naturally follows (see: "Does Confidence = Success? Actually... No.").

Cast aside the pump-up, roll up your sleeves, and go get your hands dirty; that's the secret to all the great feelings you could ever ask for.

Yet... the questions about self-esteem keep rolling in. And they are worthy questions... little else is worse in the world than being low in self-esteem.

And since those questions about self-esteem don't seem to show any sign of drying up any time soon, let's tackle them head on - and give you the plan you need to take your self-esteem into the stratosphere.

In "How to Pick Up Girls in Bars and Clubs," we had a look in passing at why dance clubs and dance floor game are so difficult to get real results with women in, aside from make outs and rapid escalations that usually don't ever lead to anything much more.

There we called it "emotional spiking," but this spiking is actually the result of a far broader and more common phenomenon seen everywhere in life and love, dance clubs being only among the more extreme examples. The phenomenon is one I've dubbed emotional cresting, and it creates some interesting wrinkles in how your interactions with people - women and men alike - play out.

Emotional cresting is about taking emotions to their extremes - those emotional spikes we mentioned before. It follows the process of emotional escalation that we mentioned as so crucial to the process of preparing a woman for intimacy in How to Make Girls Chase, except that it's an intrinsic part of everything.

There's great power in emotional cresting, but there's also significant danger to your interactions in it as well - because the higher you crest, the bigger the crash is if you can't maintain that emotional momentum.